PLATO, AS EVERYONE KNOWS, once defined man as a “featherless biped.” His student Aristotle insisted instead that man is by nature a political animal, a being whose capacity for speech compels him to live with others. So who’s right, ironic Plato or solid Aristotle? I can think of only one living writer who might reconcile the two—and that’s Donald E. Westlake, the author of the best crime-caper stories ever written. Indeed, properly read, Westlake has already reconciled Plato and Aristotle in his stories, by showing us man as the animal who can laugh at himself, use speech to explode human pretensions, and thus reach toward civilization. Donald Westlake is not only our finest living comic mystery writer, but perhaps one of our finest living philosophers. The bookstores nowadays stock an endless number of comic mysteries, the best known by Lawrence Block, Carl Hiaasen, and Gregory McDonald. Amusing as these writers often are, it is an injustice to place Westlake in their company. He is an author of a wholly different rank. His true peers are such great American humorists as Mark Twain and Ring Lardner and such great American crime novelists as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, and Raymond Chandler. You might not realize this if you go to see What’s the Worst That Could Happen?, currently showing in theaters. Starring Martin Lawrence as Westlake’s ill-starred thief (renamed from John Dortmunder to Kevin Caffrey), the film is the latest of Hollywood’s generally failed attempts to present Westlake’s crime capers—a series that includes Robert Redford in The Hot Rock (the best of a weak lot), George C. Scott in Bank Shot, Paul Le Mat in Jimmy the Kid, and Christopher Lambert in Why Me? But you can’t miss Westlake’s skill in the recently published Bad News, the latest chapter in the comic saga of the inimitable John Archibald Dortmunder—master thief and American hero, a man whose bad luck is topped only (and barely) by his resourcefulness and determination. What’s more, The Hot Rock, the first Dortmunder adventure, has just been reissued in paperback with a new preface recounting the ambiguous genesis of this singular character. And finally, Westlake has just produced—under his pseudonym “Richard Stark”—the novel Flashfire, the nineteenth adventure of his master criminal Parker, the anti-Dortmunder and reigning champion in the amorality division of American mystery fiction. Under his own name, Westlake has written forty-seven works over the past four decades. During that period, he’s also written twenty-three novels under the name “Richard Stark” (four starring Alan Grofield, a charming actor and occasional thief who is worthy of revival). And under a cloud of pseudonyms—at least five, but it’s a good bet there are more—he’s written dozens more. With characteristic irony, Westlake says of his crime-noir character Parker and his crime-blanc character Dortmunder: “It probably says something discreditable about me that I put the serious work under a pseudonym and the comic under my own name.” But precisely the opposite is true: Westlake expresses his serious thoughts in comedy because it is truer and healthier to see what is laughable about the typical, the everyday. Westlake was not originally a comic novelist. He was led to that path by the conventional mystery. Though his first novels, The Mercenaries and Killing Time, were well crafted, they remained within established boundaries. He then began experimenting with more unconventional perspectives. He wrote novels about suppressed rage (361), a young man corrupted by degrees (Killy), and the criminally insane (Pity Him Afterwards). Westlake’s most impressive early work was Levine, a series of short stories about Abe Levine, a middle-aged homicide detective with heart trouble. What makes Levine such a compelling character is his very seriousness about that which is most serious: his mortality. These early experiments didn’t necessarily lead Westlake to look at criminal things comically, but their range prefigures the turn he made in 1965 with the story of Charlie Poole, The Fugitive Pigeon. (Westlake preferred the title The Dead Nephew, but was overruled by his editor, who forbade authors from employing “death” in a title.) Charlie is a master of the art of laziness, whose Uncle Al, a mid-level mobster, found him “the perfect job”—running a money-laundering mob bar. The mob expects Charlie to lose money, and he lives up to expectations. “My Uncle Al was right; it was the job I was born for.” “Nephew” is a term of art for Westlake. A nephew is somebody irresponsible or incompetent for whom one grudgingly feels responsibility. Nephew Charlie’s life takes a turn for the worse when two mob enforcers, Trask and Slade, enter his bar and show him a card with his name and an ink blot. They are incredulous at Charlie’s incomprehension: “What a nephew. You are the biggest nephew that ever lived. You’re all the nephews in the world rolled into one, you know that?” They had come to kill him, but through good fortune and ingenuity spurred by necessity, Charlie escapes. Thus begins Charlie’s adventure and Westlake’s career as a comic novelist. In the following five years, Westlake wrote several novels exploring the genre, all of which stand the test of time. These include his worst-titled, The Spy in the Ointment, and his best-titled, God Save the Mark. The latter is the story of Fred Fitch, born victim and magnet to swindlers of all stripes. Though God Save the Mark is told from the victim’s viewpoint, one senses Westlake’s sympathy for the cleverness exhibited by Fred’s foes. The novel relates Fred’s problems upon inheriting $317,000 from black sheep Uncle Matt. “Every single relative [Matt] had reviled and snubbed him….As Mother said, ‘A lot of people would have treated Matt a heap different if they had known, believe you me.’ I believed her.” Unaware of Matt’s existence, Fred avoided offending him with ease. So by default the inheritance went to the nephew. Good as these comedies are, Westlake found his best vehicle with the Dortmunder saga. Dortmunder’s own beginnings were remarkably unpromising: “Born in Dead Indian, Illinois, and abandoned at three minutes of age, John Dortmunder had been raised in an orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery.” Only by virtue of dedication and native talent has Dortmunder risen to the top of his profession. Dortmunder works hard to earn what he steals. Only slightly less challenging were the obstacles Westlake overcame to bring Dortmunder into being. Westlake conceived of The Hot Rock’s storyline as a Parker adventure: “What if he had to steal the same thing over and over again?” Rejecting the idea as too comic for Parker, Westlake needed a new leading man, one whose fatalism would temper his frustration: “Who was this guy—dogged but doomed?…For a long time I just couldn’t think of the right name, and then one day, I was in a bar—the only time in my life—and one of the neon beer logos on the back said ‘DAB—Dortmunder Actien Bier,’ and, I said, ‘That’s what I want, an action hero with something wrong with him,’ and John Dortmunder was born.” Yet halfway through writing the first story, Westlake “ran out of steam,” abandoning Dortmunder to a closet—which would have deprived the world of the German contribution to humor—and promptly forgetting him. (As Westlake asks, “Why remember failures?”—echoing, no doubt intentionally, Xenophon’s pronouncement, “It is noble as well as just and pious and more pleasant to remember the good things rather than the bad ones.”) Fortunately, upon rediscovering Dortmunder, Westlake summoned his own Dortmunderian resolve, and “John Dortmunder’s one and only story was ready to fly.” Perhaps to vindicate the dictum that new things are noble because they are difficult, Westlake burdened himself with an entirely misleading epigraph from Nietzsche: “The criminal is the type of strong man in unfavorable surroundings, the strong man made sick.” Far more appropriate would
have been the epigraph to the Parker novel Comeback: “The outcome you have waited for is assured. Continue to persevere.”—Chinese Fortune Cookie. The Hot Rock follows Dortmunder’s efforts to steal the Balabomo Emerald, sacred object to two small African countries, temporarily on display in New York. Dortmunder is commissioned by the U.N. ambassador of Talabwo to “rescue” the emerald from the Akinzi. Dortmunder devises a plan that circumvents museum security with ease. It was a plan that should have worked. Through no fault of his, it didn’t, and Dortmunder reacts with characteristic resignation. He blames neither his associates nor the gods. Presented with another chance—by breaking into jail—Dortmunder is persuaded to try again by his temperamental opposite and ambiguous friend, Andrew Octavian Kelp. (To get a sense of Kelp’s character it is enough to consider his initials, upon which Dortmunder could very well choke; in Bad News, Westlake writes “John looked Andy over, as though considering him as a pet: Keep him, or have him put to sleep?”) This pattern—unmerited failure, stoic resignation, and reluctant acquiescence to one last shot—is repeated at a police station and a mental hospital. Before he can quite complete the second revolution, however, one of the book’s antagonists—an unscrupulous attorney who voluntarily entered an insane asylum to keep the thieves at arm’s length—laughs at Dortmunder from behind the safety of an electrified fence. That’s a miscalculation. Dortmunder is inured to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He expects life to kick him. Yet he is also a man of a certain pride. “He can’t laugh at me. I’ve had enough….If he thinks, he can stay in that place, he’s crazy.” (The attorney, not having learned his lesson, shortly thereafter makes a memorable statement that almost provided the book’s title: “‘I’ve heard of the habitual criminal, of course,’ Prosker said pleasantly, ‘but this may be the first instance in the history of the world of a habitual crime.’” At the last minute Westlake decided to change The Habitual Crime to The Hot Rock.) The virtues Dortmunder shows in all of his tales are worth considering. Bad News opens with a late-night burglary: “Speedshop was a great sprawling mass-production retailer stocked mostly with things that weren’t worth a quarter and didn’t cost more than four dollars.” Dortmunder’s shopping after hours seems almost respectable. He is a Robin Hood for an age with an ethic of individual responsibility: He robs from the rich and shares with the deserving dishonest. Dortmunder’s colleague Tiny Bulcher—”a man mountain who mostly looks like a fairy tale character that eats villages”—gives memorable voice to this way of life in What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: Tiny was explaining to a panhandler why it had been rude to ask Tiny for money. “You didn’t earn this money. For instance,” he was saying, “the money I got in my jeans this minute, where do you suppose I got it? Huh? I’ll tell you where I got it. I stole it from some people uptown. It was hard work, and there was some risk in it, and I earned it. Did you earn it? Did you risk anything? Did you work hard?” Tiny held the panhandler a little closer to him to give him some parting advice. “Get a job,” he said, “or get a gun. But don’t beg. It’s rude.” So, too, Dortmunder is unfailingly loyal to his friends and colleagues as well as his faithful companion, the long suffering May. And in his idiosyncratic way, Dortmunder is a just man. When flush, he never begrudges friends in need: “If he had it, they could have it, and the kind of people they were, they’d take his two hundred dollars and go directly to jail.” Dortmunder occasionally even rises to Shakespearean eloquence: “If this thing was gonna get done, it was better that it got itself done soonest.” Dortmunder is a man of peace. It is the rare occasion when he resorts to violence, never unprovoked or excessive. Dortmunder’s most violent act occurs when, in Don’t Ask, he escapes an unjust imprisonment by cold-cocking “an economist from Yale”—an action prompted by necessity, but not needing much excuse. Dortmunder embodies the superior dignity of the thoughtful, and his associates recognize his natural authority. As Tiny puts it: “Wherever there’s a lot of money, Dortmunder, there’s always sooner or later some use for the guy who does the thinking, which is you, and the guy who does the heavy lifting, which is me.” Yet Dortmunder does not abuse his power. He never demands more than an equal share of the loot, thus demonstrating why from a certain perspective—that of their own common good—a prudent gang of thieves is the best social order. (Westlake thereby intuits Kant’s dictum: “The problem of establishing the good social order is soluble even for a nation of devils, provided they have sense.”) Westlake’s plots invariably defy brief recapitulation. As Andy Kelp summarizes the plot of Bad News: “John and Tiny and me got involved with some people doing an Anastasia, and we need a right DNA sample, and it’s gonna be on a comb in a place with hundreds of thousands of dollars of valuable stuff, so while we’re there anyway, why don’t we take it all?” An Anastasia is an attempt to establish a line of descent for fraudulently obtaining an inheritance. The Anastasia Dortmunder stumbled into was conceived by gifted confidence man Fitzroy Guilderpost. It sought to establish “Little Feather Redcorn” as the last of the Pottaknobbee and, as such, entitled to one-third of the profits of a casino on a reservation. Yet Dortmunder feels unease about the propriety of collecting money not earned in a manner consistent with his sense of the fitness of things. “I mean, why am I in this place? I’m not a con artist. I’m not a grafter. I’m a thief. There’s nothing here to steal. We’re just riding Little Feather’s coattails….I think of myself as a person with a certain dignity and a certain professional ability and a certain standing, but what’s happening here is I’m looking for crumbs from somebody else’s table, so why am I here?” “That’s a very good question,” Tiny rumbled, and Kelp said, “To be perfectly honest, John—” “Don’t strain yourself.” “No, no, no, in this issue only,” Kelp assured him. Edward Banfield once wrote of an unusual academic candidate interviewed at the University of Chicago: an ex-convict. After a faculty lunch, that candidate asked who had been sitting across from him. Informed it was Leo Strauss, the ex-con replied, “He has the look of a man planning a break”—a description that delighted Strauss. Dortmunder would be a man after Strauss’s heart, for it was Strauss who said, “A conservative, I take it, is a man who despises vulgarity; but the argument which is concerned exclusively with calculations of success, and is based on blindness to the nobility of the effort, is vulgar.” Bad News is the eleventh Dortmunder tale since Westlake created him in 1970 (ten novels and the short story “Too Many Crooks”). Dortmunder is not the underdog for whom everybody roots. Unlike that underdog—invariably less talented than his opponent—Dortmunder deserves to succeed. That he does not isn’t a reflection on him, but his luck. Thus it isn’t surprising that in the most recent tales, Dortmunder’s fortunes have changed for the better. Though nothing has come without struggle, he has with Bad News raised his winning percentage to better than .500: four successes (more or less), three defeats, and four outcomes defying simple classification. Since the publication of The Hot Rock, Westlake has written twenty novels without Dortmunder. His most conventionally ambitious is Kahawa, the story of two mercenaries’ attempted theft of a train carrying $6,000,000 of Idi Amin’s coffee. (“A most respectable crime,” to use the words of one of my teachers.) Though the comedy of manners isn’t Westlake’s bailiwick, A Likely Story wonderfully captures the character—and characterlessness—of romantic love and its impediments in modern America, including the often un
forgivable vice of failing to appreciate what one has until one no longer has it. Of the twenty non-Dortmunder books, eleven are comic crime capers, and they all exhibit Westlake’s wittiness. The most amusing are Smoke, Help I am Being Held Prisoner, and Two Much. Smoke is a light and airy crime novel with a twist; it tells the story of a thief who accidentally ingests a combination of experimental formulae that render him invisible—a formlessness as personally unsettling as it is professionally useful. Help I am Being Held Prisoner tells the story of a practical joker who told one joke too many, resulting in a congressman’s car accident—which leads to his incarceration in a prison where he stumbles across a coterie of inmates with a tunnel to the outside world. The setup for a perfect escape, no? Only one thing holds them back: They don’t wish to escape. Why undergo the risks of escape when you can have a pleasant day in town and a nice, safe prison bed at night? No less amusing, but less satisfactory, is Two Much, the story of Art Dodge, a moderately successful writer of humorous greeting cards with an overactive imagination and an overactive libido. Having met a beautiful girl, Elizabeth Kerner—whose considerable wealth tarnishes her beauty not a whit—Art naturally seeks her good graces via witty repartee and shared experiences. Upon learning that Elizabeth had a twin sister, Elisabeth, Art declares, to his future dismay: “I’m twins too.” Thus is born Bart Dodge. After some extremely funny missteps, Art (and Bart) finds himself (or themselves) married to the Kerner twins. This is not a recipe for marital bliss. And when Volpinex (an unscrupulous attorney whose name sounds like a cross between a wolf and an acne medication) discovers Dodge’s dodge, Art seems to have no out but to kill him. He hadn’t, however, counted upon one of his wives witnessing the murder. So, in a panic, he kills her. And so on. Somehow this ending leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. Comedy ignores certain rules at its own risk, and Two Much too quickly transforms itself from slightly bent light comedy to dark comedy, thereby losing a considerable degree of its charm. But this fascination with the darker side of human behavior—a product of the same detachment that allows Westlake to view serious things comically—appears in a number of his works that aren’t unqualified successes. The most unsatisfying, Pity Him Afterwards and The Ax, are journeys into the minds of the criminally mad. Pity Him Afterwards is the tale of a nameless madman intent on destroying his medical tormentors, and The Ax is a chronicle of an everyman’s descent into mass murder. Westlake deserves credit for making such stories compelling. Yet even he cannot tell a tale solely about human ugliness that doesn’t partake of that which it depicts. That’s something Westlake understands in the hardboiled crime novels about Parker he writes as “Richard Stark.” Parker is an amoral killer with a peculiar sense of justice. He first made his appearance in The Hunter (1962), and for thirteen years kept himself busy. After his sixteenth adventure, he went into a quarter-century retirement, only to come back in 1997’s Comeback, since followed by Backflash and Flashfire. There is a typical form to the tales. Parker and some colleagues engage in a lucrative, illicit, and often violent enterprise, which leaves little to chance. Yet despite masterful planning and execution, something always goes wrong. That something is usually associates who cross Parker. (You’d think by now they would’ve learned better.) Unlike Dortmunder’s, Parker’s difficulties don’t arise from fortune’s malice. Circumstances don’t conspire against him. Men do. And then Parker seeks his revenge. Parker cannot abide being cheated by his fellow “mechanics.” He would be the poster criminal for the dictum “Don’t get mad, get even” were it not that his maxim is better formulated as “Don’t get mad, kill them.” Parker is not a sociopath who takes pleasure in his disdain for the decent. (For a contrast, consider Baron Chase in Westlake’s Kahawa, “a man so steeped in his villainy that the evidences of his evil now only amused him.” Nor does Parker embody the pure negativity of Iago: “I am not what I am.”) Parker derives no pleasure from killing. It needlessly complicates things. Instead he is motivated by pride and justice, if only the justice of the proverbial gang of thieves: Justice is necessary for everybody who is not willing to be alone. Parker was not intended to be a series character. Westlake originally concluded The Hunter with Parker’s death. Yet at an editor’s suggestion, Westlake reconsidered. Since Parker was not a prime candidate for divine resurrection, Westlake rewrote the ending, and the series was off and running. The latest volume, Flashfire, is a typical Parker adventure—well crafted, swift moving, and highly entertaining. It begins with a spectacular armed robbery by Parker and three confederates that yields almost $100,000. Though not Parker’s most lucrative payday, it’s not bad for an afternoon’s crime. Yet his confederates don’t immediately share the “boodle.” Instead, they invite Parker to use that haul as seed money for a more spectacular heist they have planned—one requiring their robbery’s entire proceeds. Parker declines. So they leave him $2,000, his life, and promise of repayment. Parker considers this a breach of normal criminal ethics. Fueled by betrayal, Parker procures the means necessary to meet his erstwhile partners under rather different circumstances. Still, it is the Dortmunder stories that one remembers and returns to. Westlake is more than simply a clever, unfailingly amusing, and inventive author. The Dortmunder stories form perhaps the only series of its sort in which the later books are every bit as fresh as the early ones. An author can maintain such a standard only if he never stops delighting in writing and thinking. Westlake is the anti-Hemingway, who—by not taking himself too seriously—teaches us not to take ourselves too seriously. This is a particularly timely lesson. Americans are extraordinarily touchy folks, quick to take offense at slights. Such a way of looking at things is alien to Westlake. He finds something laughable about us all. Consider his description of the hit show Desdemona!, the feminist musical version of the world-famous love story, slightly altered for the modern American taste (everybody lives). Hit songs from the show include “Oh, Tell, Othello, Oh, Tell,” and “Iago, My Best Friend,” and the foot-stomping finale, “Here’s the Handkerchief.” Can one find a better and wittier shorthand description of contemporary American aspirations? Wouldn’t it be a wonderful world in which no one died young, everyone got along, and things always worked out? Nothing is sacred for Westlake. To laugh at everything that one is today forbidden to laugh at is the essence of his intention. (Or to use a phrase of Machiavelli’s, Westlake seeks to look at all things sanza alcuno rispetto, “without any respect.”) Yet it is precisely not his intention to offend, but to show us ourselves in such a way as to make us less likely to take offense: For example, though Westlake is not hostile to religion, he finds humor in places—monasteries (Brother’s Keepers) and convents (Good Behavior)—typically uncongenial to comic treatment. He succeeds by portraying what is both unnatural and potentially amusing about living with a vow of silence while simultaneously showing that the dignity of the truly decent rises above the merely ridiculous. For Westlake the besetting vice today is moralism, that disposition that leads one to seek to silence those with whom one disagrees. In Westlake’s novels one doesn’t, for example, encounter gay characters manly in every respect other than sexual preference. Though not unsympathetic, they are identifiably gay, typically somewhat effete and affected. The blue-collar regulars at a bar are boastful, ignorant, and argumentative, with volubility in inverse relation to actual knowledge. Most imp
ortant, Westlake’s men and women—despite their remarkable range and variety—always remain men and women. One encounters tough broads and babes as well as sophisticated ladies—but they are identifiably broads, babes, and ladies. Westlake’s writings are a refreshing antidote to all that makes us afraid to laugh. As Thomas Aquinas taught, some things lie outside the scope of human knowledge, but others do not. Fortunately, one of the things that lies within the reach of human knowledge is the fact that the writings of Donald E. Westlake constitute an American treasure. Steven Lenzner is completing his dissertation in political science at Harvard University.
